Bond's bespoke Bentley Continental Roadster - "The Locomotive"

[Deggers]

"Bond had the most selfish car in England. It was a mark II continental Bentley that some rich idiot had married to a telegraph pole on the Great West Road ... Bond had gone to Mulliners with £3000, which was half his total capital, and they had sawn off the old cramped saloon body and had fitted a trim, rather square convertible, two-seater affair, power operated, with only two large armed bucket seats in black leather. The rest of the blunt end was all knife-edged, rather ugly, trunk. She went like a bird and a bomb, and Bond loved her more than all the women at present in his life rolled, if that were feasible, together."

This is Ian Fleming's introduction to Bond's own private car in the 1961 novel Thunderball. Jack Pegoraro of Number 27 chats with the car designer and 007 fan who turned "the most selfish car in England" from fiction into fact.

Deggers

[john.r.davies]

Not his first Bentley though.  In Casino Royale, the first novel, "  Bond’s car was his only personal hobby. One of the last of the 4½-litre Bentleys with the supercharger by Amherst Villiers, he had bought it almost new in 1933 and had kept it in careful storage through the war. It was still serviced every year and, in London, a former Bentley mechanic, who worked in a garage near Bond’s Chelsea flat, tended it with jealous care."

That car was destroyed by Le Chiffre.   But Bond, ever indestructible, survives not only that but unspeakable torture by that evil entrepreneur.   He would of course, as by the above account, he must have been already in his late 40s in '61, and 109 today.

John